Comment by lambda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lambda | Hacker News Reader

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Even in its prime, it simply didn't have enough interest from Debian developers for maintaining an official port.

With each release there are roll-call emails to help judge whether a port has sufficient maintenance to be included in the official release, and I generally see a single developer for SuperH/SH4: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/10/msg00134.html

There are a few more developers listed on the qualification page, but they don't seem to be responding to the roll-call messages: https://wiki.debian.org/ArchiveQualification/sh4

Debian doesn't sit down and do market research on amount of hardware shipped, and then allocate developers and resources based on that; they base whether there's an official port on whether there are already enough developers and infrastructure to maintain it, as builds failing on that port can block work on packages.

And besides the developers, the SH4 port had infrastructure issues, such as taking 6 days to build GCC: https://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2011/04/msg00173.htm...

So the answer to "why wasn't SH4 an official port" is likely "there simply weren't enough developers and infrastructure for supporting it."

> There are a few more developers listed on the qualification page, but they don't seem to be responding to the roll-call messages: https://wiki.debian.org/ArchiveQualification/sh4

I am one of these DDs and also official kernel maintainer of the SuperH port. I am not responding to such roll-call messages because there is no new SuperH hardware on the horizon at the moment except for the stalled J-Core project.

> And besides the developers, the SH4 port had infrastructure issues, such as taking 6 days to build GCC: https://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2011/04/msg00173.htm...

Well, the current RISC-V buildds also take days to build GCC. On the other hand, the 64-bit SPARC machines have been among the fastest in Debian, yet there is no official port.

> So the answer to "why wasn't SH4 an official port" is likely "there simply weren't enough developers and infrastructure for supporting it."

I would argue that the main reason is that Renesas simply abandoned the architecture and replaced it in their own applications with ARM.

The prospective 64-bit SuperH port was dropped as well.

Yeah, I was responding to the "why wasn't it ever official even when it was reasonably popular", not why it's not now. Those threads I linked to were from 10 years ago or more.

I tried looking for any direct discussion in the past of making it an official architecture, and didn't find it, but I did find that it seems to have been slightly lower activity, and with some hurdles, and that there didn't seem to be much of a push to make it an official Debian architecture, while there's been active effort to make RISC-V an official architecture, that's been going on for several years.

Anyhow, I'm not a DD or DM, I've made a few contributions via maintainers, so you're clearly more involved than I am. I was just trying to shed some light on the question of why SuperH never was official, and as far as I can tell it's because no one ever put enough effort in to make it official, while they have done so for RISC-V. But maybe I missed some drama somewhere.

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